MICHELLE JANE LEE

ANONYMOUS

NOVEMBER 13 – DECEMBER 18, 2014

OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2014, 7 – 9 PM

GARBOUSHIAN GALLERY is pleased to present a solo exhibition of artist Michelle Jane Lee in ANONYMOUS.

Bright, light and calm, Lee’s abstract creations are the epitome of serenity and poise, and embody energy and honest intention within its use of color and form. Her inspiration is personal and intimate and her execution is organized and meticulous. Without delving into specifics of one person or one experience, Lee’s newest body of work investigates symbolism and representation of meaning through personal codes and colors.

Michelle Jane Lee’s paintings and sculptures are a calm and thoughtful exaltation of color, a deconstruction of language through form, and a jarring experience of real sincerity. Unapologetically emotional, contradictory to her minimalist aesthetic and conceptual methodology, Lee represents a new wave of artists practicing “Emotional Conceptualism.” Dedicated to celebrating sensitivity and narrative while embracing a process-based approach towards abstraction, Lee’s work proves conceptualism and emotion need not be mutually exclusive.

Lee’s work often explores personal cryptography, creating secret languages made up of her own personal symbols and colors to express simple words or phrases. Her work reflects a coping process, finding order in the chaos of intense emotion. In some of her work, Lee constructs a personal alphabet by assigning a color to each letter to communicate and navigate profound personal experiences in love and loss —

MICHELLE JANE LEE

in her own words, "to say everything without saying anything, without being found out.” Representing both the desire to communicate devotion and the desperation to keep it a secret, the work externalizes an internal battle—elevating an emotional crisis through an obsessively systematic practice and sublime formal symbolization.

This new series serves as an exploration of the way some people in our lives exist inside the secret places of ourselves. Informed by personal experience, it is the great universality in this concept Lee brings to focus—the ways an intense lover still persists even after a relationship is over, in influence and interactions, albeit only in our own minds. They cease to be in our actual lives, but continue to exist anonymously.

With Anonymous, Lee concentrates on the echoes left reverberating from her codified letters. Striving to reconcile the objective reality of original life events with the lingering memories they impart, paying respect to literal events, but focusing more closely on the abstracted imprint they leave behind in our minds and hearts.

An opening reception for Michelle Jane Lee's ANONYMOUS will take place at Garboushian Gallery on Thursday, November 13, 2014 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm. The exhibition will remain on view until December 18, 2014.

ABOUT MICHELLE JANE LEE:
Michelle Jane Lee (Korean born), studied at School of the Art institute of Chicago and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.